A few unexpected twists and turns to the day today... Looks like my server IP address changed during the night and that change wasn't detected and reported to the DNS service - sorry if the site seemed down and email didn't work for a while. It should be fixed now (spam's coming in again, yay), and while looking for the cause of the problem I also noticed some very interesting stats over at ZoneEdit [4], who are my DNS host: turns out that DNS lookups of the media-culture.org.au domains for M/C - Media and Culture [5] have grown almost exponentially over the last years!

Lookups for snurb.info haven't grown quite as fast, but there's still a good upwards trend (and note that the last data is from almost a year ago, before I started blogging in earnest).

The downside is that because of the greater traffic coming through I think they'll start charging for hosting the M/C domain now. The price of success...

Also today was the first lecture of a guest to the just-launched Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation [8] (iCi) at QUT (which, having been launched on 10 August, now shares a birthday with me) - they were hosting Stephen Coleman [9] from the Oxford Internet Institute. An interesting study of voters in the UK Big Brother and the 2005 UK elections, which I'll try and post some more notes about later.

A while before Stephen's talk, some of us were invited to meet with him in John Hartley [10]'s office - I'm happy to say that John has become key promoter for my book [11] recently, and Stephen (whose work is mainly in e-democracy) was very interested in my study of participatory online journalism. No doubt there will be more work on this and related areas as iCi gets going!